I highly recommend the Start Menu 8 from iobit.com
Yes. Lot's of aftermarket software is cashing in on people's insecurities. Sort of like Norton's Desktop cashed in on people when the Start menu was added. Why iobit's product and not Classic Shell or StarDock's Start8, though?
Their W8 Start Menu will allow you to bypass the Metro screen all together.
Booting to the Standard desktop is available in Windows 8.1.
Why on earth M$ would remove their Hallmark "Start Button" is simply beyond reason!
The Start button was never removed. In 8.0 it had no image and acted more as a hot corner to get to the start screen. 8.1 adds the button back, it still goes to the start screen. Most people complaining about the loss of the start menu are either weird people that never actually realized that the Search feature was a million times better and faster than wandering through a billion Start menu folders to find an application. (I press windows key, type 2012, and press enter to start Visual Studio 2012 on both Win7 and Win8.
There is no arguing that this is faster than going Start->All Programs->Navigating down to Microsoft Visual Studio 2012, and choosing Visual Studio 2012. Same for applications like photoshop. Pretty much anything on the start menu is accessible via a quick search, so the only thing lost is when you don't know what you are starting.
In which case, why the heck are you in the start menu?
My prediction on W8 is pretty much in par with Windows Millennium which got brushed under the rug soon after it was released before XP.
ME was an interim release on par with Visual Basic 3.0 in terms of releasing what they had before a major rearchitecture. In this case it was the last release of the 9x line.
I've yet to find any evidence that ME had any particularly major issues, certainly none it didn't share with Windows 98SE. Most problems with Windows ME seem to revolve around the design that avoids MS-DOS mode, or, most likely, problems people had with OEM systems that can preinstalled with Windows ME.
Vista had it's huge problems in the beginning but once SP1 was released it became a better operating system.
Neat. What changes in SP1 made it better, specifically? What portions of SP1 are single-handed responsible for changing Vista from Bad to good? Just curious.
In both Vista and 7 the UAC can be completely deactivated. The UAC is a farce IMHO and simply ads annoyance to both systems. Just go to the Control Panel/User Accounts and disable the UAC. You'll enjoy your computer much more without it.
And you have just expressed how ignorant you are.
UAC is downright critical and addresses the biggest issues that existed in Windows up to that time, which was the fact that the default setup not only ran under administrator permissions, but it also made administering a Limited User Account setup difficult.
Trojans are simply the 99.9% of how Windows systems get infected.
On XP, every user is an administrator. the important thing is that every application they run has full administrative privileges. So if that super happy screensaver is a trojan, that malicious code can do whatever it wants to the system. Direct disk access to write to the boot sector, changing system files. It can even install a service to run under the Local System Account, giving it even more free range over the systems internals.
Now, I don't know about anybody else, but I don't see any good reason to give those programs you run everyday full administrative privileges. Pre-Vista, Windows support for LUA existed, but was really only something that was worth the effort on Domains; it required a lot of fiddling about with knobs, dials, GPEdit, etcetera. for XP you could, for example, create non-admin accounts, but if you needed to do any admin tasks you had to log off and log back on, making it a gigantic pain.
UAC tries to address this. When UAC is enabled, when you log on, your account's Security Identifier is stripped of all the administrative privileges. Any Application requiring those privileges will give you a UAC prompt (if they are written properly) or fail altogether (if they aren't) in the latter case you would need to "Run as Administrator" but you still get the UAC prompt. The point is to make sure that all the applications that run with administrative privileges have your permission to do so.
This also mitigates the problem for even those applications you might otherwise trust; in XP since everything ran with admin privileges, a security problem in Firefox, or Chrome, or Word, or Excel, or Internet Explorer, could take over your machine. A simple oversight in a javascript parser could be all that a malicious programmer needs to install a Remote Access Trojan on your system, without you even knowing it. UAC prevents this because the browser isn't running with admin privileges, so the damage can only extend to what your stripped user token is capable of, which for any sort of malicious software is usually pretty useless.
Vista's only problem with UAC is that people got so used to the prompt that they unconditionally said yes anyway, making the function useless. Win7 improved it and added more options so that more of the prompts were "important" decisions, mostly for when you ran a executable that required admin permissions for whatever reason. Then you could decide whether you were willing to hand over those abilities. UAC is sort of like a gynecologists assistant that makes sure the gynecologist (the software program) doesn't do anything inappropriate without your permission.
The fact that there was so much hate against UAC is proof that the vast majority of the userbase simply doesn't understand the difference. They don't see it as additional security, they see it as additional inconvenience, and they don't understand that to get the latter you are going to have to put up with some of the former, simply by virtue of the way it works.
